This invention relates to an automatic response system and, more particularly, to an inquiry-response system in which responses are supplied in real time to one or more inquiring lines or stations.
Numerous inquiry-response systems are known in the art. Typically, they include a storage device at a central location having predetermined response messages stored therein to be transmitted to requesting remote stations or the like. To this end, computers including a mass storage device for storing messages or segments thereof, either in analog or digital form, are employed to respond to inquiries via telephone lines or the like from any of now numerous terminal equipments, for example, telephone station sets, multifrequency signaling units, teletypewriters, et cetera. In prior known systems, the computer is programmed to recognize that inquiries have been made, determine an appropriate response, concatenate the response from the stored information and transfer the desired information from the mass storage device to the requesting line and, hence, the requesting station or terminal equipment. In some known systems, digital words representing segments of speech are transferred from the mass storage device to an output buffer and then to the requesting lines. Additionally, some systems are arranged to handle requests from a plurality of lines simultaneously. This is achieved by employing input and output multiplexers. In general, the output multiplexers have included buffer stages for temporarily storing the analog or digital signals which make up the desired response message to be outputted. For the most part, these prior known systems have employed complex and expensive arrangements for obtaining the desired speech output. Thus, although they may be satisfactory for some applications, they are unattractive for others from a commercial standpoint.